September 29, 2014

Arbitration Mailbox Exchange 2010 and 2013

Exchange Server system mailbox is also called "Arbitration" mailbox. Exchange Server uses these mailboxes for various tasks. These mailboxes are being created when you setup first exchange server preparing Active Directory /PrepareAD in the root domain of the AD Forest.

if you would like to locate these mailboxes you would use get-mailbox –Arbitration cmdlet and if you are in the root and child domain environment, you have to adjust the PS search to look at the root of the forest to locate these accounts.

Set-ADServerSettings -ViewEntireForest $true

Get-mailbox -Arbitration | fl name,Database,DisplayName,ServerName

Name : SystemMailbox{1f05a927-eac1-46e7-9a47-611e1a81bb50}

Name : SystemMailbox{e0dc1c29-89c3-4034-b678-e6c29d823ed9}

Name : SystemMailbox{bb558c35-97f1-4cb9-8ff7-d53741dc928c}

Name : Migration.8f3e7716-2011-43e4-96b1-aba62d229136

If you go to root of your active directory forest you will be able to locate the user accounts associating with these system mailboxes.

By default they are located at the users container in the root of the AD Forest.

Arbitration system mailboxes keeps & stores organization wide data in them such as

eDiscovery Searches Metadata ( if you are using search-mailbox cmdlet with –targetmailbox switch and offloading searched enterprise data, before deleting the Arbitration system mailboxes could get potential big with the metadata collection as repository)

In most of the cases these account you wont pay huge attention , as they are not exposed to EMC and there is less chance them getting deleted. To be better prepared you can turn on “Protect object from accidental deletion” on these accounts.

You can do same work from PS , the most common way is to ask for help if you do not remember the cmdlet